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Colleen Jollie, the state tribal liaison at the Washington State Department of Transportation, practices a form of transformational public administration that, at its heart, reflects a Coyote or "trickster" style of management. In indigenous stories across the world, the trickster uses his or her wiles to disrupt, refuse, and dismantle ways that are not working in order to creatively, and sometimes chaotically, build new ways. Jollie's work as lead tribal liaison has transformed the agency, the tribes, and the relationships between tribes and the agency, creating a culture of cooperation across significant differences and honoring the transformational energy required to cooperate across difference. Like the Coyote, who does what needs to be done through many means, but mostly through thoughtful effort, Jollie works to create change that serves both the state and the tribes. As this profile indicates, the work isn't always easy and the outcomes don't always spell success, but the work is necessary for tribes and state governments to forge the kinds of relationships imagined in treaties and in other agreements between sovereign governments.

The supposed dichotomy between theory and practice is, like other dichotomies we have known, a false one. It is rooted in a paradigm in which theory is conceptualized as lawlike generalizations that cumulatively constitute an ever-growing body of knowledge. Practitioners/experts are supposedly then able to improve managerial effectiveness by applying such knowledge to practice. When public administration theory fails to produce relevant law like generalizations and instead produces abstract conjecture, a gap between theory and practice is perceived to exist. The authors propose practical theory wherein practice and theory are mutually constitutive. Although not the first to urge that public administration theory be grounded in experience, this article argues that the structuration theory of sociologist Anthony Giddens surpasses previous frameworks in addressing the theory/practice problem in public administration.